https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/tristram-shandy-by-laurence-sterne/

I first read Tristram Shandy when I was 23, more than thirty years ago, and still have the slightly mildewed paperback that I picked up off a Cambridge bookstall one day in late 1990. I can’t honestly tell you what happens in it; I can’t find any particular lines that resonate or are very quotable; the most memorable moment is when our hero’s penis gets caught in the windowframe in Book 5 Chapter 17. (Sorry for the spoiler.)

And yet somehow I love it. It’s rambling, self-indulgent, full of references to things I know nothing about; and at the same time the stream-of-consciousness narrative, the refusal to make many concessions to the reader who wants to know what is actually going on, are part of the charm. It’s clearly an inspiration for Joyce, Woolf, and lots of the modernist writers who I really like; but it’s a book of its own time, requiring friendly engagement and repaying that engagement with warmth and humour. ( )

You almost feel that you are looking at the world through the eyes of a drunk, a very merry drunk, but a drunk all the same. This novel, Don Quixote, and John Barth's The Sot-Weed factor rank among my all-time favourites. ( )

This new edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is the first book published by Visual Editions: a new London-based book publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction who make use of what they call "visual writing." They believe books should be as visually compelling as the stories they tell, and their strapline is "great looking stories." Their aim to publish The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as their first title is to show where the idea of "visual writing" originated, to show where it all began. The idea is to bring out the book’s brilliance and playfulness again, to dust it down from its shoddy Dover Classics image and make it accessible and relevant again to a more contemporary audience. Visual Editions asked the designers to breathe new life into the book and told the designers to add new visual elements in as well. As long as they stayed faithful to Sterne's spirit, then VE were happy to let the designers roam. And so they did: a shut door is a folded page, perspiration is pages of dotted spot varnish and the marbled page is a moiré of a black-and-white photograph (a nod to contemporary printing technologies, in the way that the marbled page was a result of technologies of the time). British author Will Self introduces the book, with the typically wonderful irreverence that Sterne himself would have loved.

Sometimes the archaic (even for the time) language and incredibly twisty sentences get a bit too much, but that's part of the humour. The way the book messes around with what a book *is* and the ideas of narrative structure are laugh out loud funny and made funnier by the things that also make it difficult to read sometimes. Highlights include a chapter where he plays the fiddle between events, including some incredible onomatopoeia, and a chapter which he begins by apologising for digressing constantly, describes the difficulties involved in writing as such for 2 pages, and then apologises again and starts the chapter again. ( )

Silliness. Stuff and nonsense.
Inspired, metatextual, unbeatable silliness. ( )

Reading this again. Not sure I really appreciated it the first time around.

Couldn't get into it this time. Will try a few years from now. ( )

I don't recall much about Tristram, and probably did not finish the book. ( )

I really quite like the idea of a post-modern book written in the pre-modern era, and I know that Tristram Shandy is an interesting concept from the Steve Coogan movie. It's just... why does it have to be so... rambly? and full of self-congratulatory references to contemporary literature?

I'm afraid I couldn't look past the form of it all. Dashes everywhere. More than Emily Dickinson. I soon worked out that Sterne had used dashes to indicate the rhythm of speech and (too many) commas for a purely grammatical function, but that meant that I had to start sounding the thing out in my head for it to make sense to me. Was this normal back then, or something? The copy of the book I had also had a notes section at the back to explain all Sterne's hyperspecific references to wars I hadn't heard of and vocabulary that has utterly fallen into disuse. It was very useful for me, but a pain to have to keep flipping back and forth - and it made me feel like I was in school again.

I think it might have worked better for me as an audiobook. In that format I just let things wash if they don't make full sense. ( )

Difficult read. I like Swift and Fieldling, but this was a lot of work. Listening to it as an audio book turned out to be the best bet. Some funny stuff. I found Part 1 of the most interest, so take that in and see how it goes from there. I listened to the whole thing, and found it ulitmately an endurance test, and more significant as a historical artifact. Amusing characters, when they managed to surface up through the famous “digressions”. And then they bring their own. I have great respect for it, but can't really recommend it.
One important thing: this is very much a novel about the aftermath of war. It’s clear in the reading to a modern reader- whatever else happened to him, that a central character Uncle Toby, is suffering from PTSD, after his injuries in the Nine Years War. The novel’s general obfuscation, mirrors that character’s obfuscation about his groin inury received at the Battle of Namur in that war. So despite it’s absurdities, the novel circles around these things for it’s entirety, and never really develops as a conventional narrative much in the same way the character of Uncle Toby never proceeds past recreating the battle where he received his injury, in miniature, on his house grounds. . So Sterne’s intention’s regardless of the whimsy, seem darkly serious. It’s interesting that I’ve never seen it referred to as an anti war novel, and it may not be, but enough of the content, functions as a critique of war and it’s aftermath. ( )

Tediously brilliant. ( )

I'm trying to think of something nice to say, but I can't! This is a "novel" with chaotic form, sub-standard grammar, punctuation and spelling. Again, I don't know the author personally, but in this case he was long-winded. He digressed so much that I forgot what the point of the paragraph or even the sentence was--if there was a point. The entire novel was a series of digressions until I had no idea what the novel was about. It is advertised as "bawdy" humor, which I'm not opposed to--but nothing but downright trash here. Why oh why did I continue to read this? It's a compulsion to finish, I must S.T.O.P.! I thought certainly it would get better, after all, it's a classic! 735 pages ( )

Jäi kesken toukokussa 2022. Jatkan ehdottomasti tilaisuuden tullen.

It's great if you enjoy obscure satire and dick jokes. ( )

So. I was required to read this for my Humanities class. . . and a funnier, crazier, more elaborate piece of nothing I have never read. Never read things like this with people who don't get dirty jokes. Otherwise, explanations could get awkward.

3 stars- because it's funny.
Not 4 stars- because it was bordering on dirty. Probably won't read it again, but it was better than Oedipus. ( )

This was a labor if ever there was one. Early on, I debated abandoning it but decided to stick it out since it's supposed to be a pillar of our literature. There are some funny bits, and surely it was audacious for its time, but this was about as much of a slog as I've worked through. ( )

This is a novel that has, since it’s publication in 1759, divided opinion throughout the ages. It certainly divided mine as you can tell from the review radar below.

While I’m all for authors trying to push the envelope of what a novel can do, such experimentation often comes at a price. In this case, the price to be paid was a great deal of readability and, unless you can excuse an autobiography dedicating hundreds of pages solely to the birth of the protagonist, any sense of plot.

Sterne was both a genius and massively influential. But genii are often unaware of the masses’ need for accessibility, much like most of us are unaware how hard using scissors is for lefties.

I’m not going to lie and say I enjoyed having this read to me. I didn’t. In fact, I let out a loud cheer in the car when it finally finished. But in reading further online, I can see quite how foundational this novel was. It set standards for what writers could do, how cheeky they could be, and asked questions of what the novel was fundamentally for.

However, I think it’s more than fair to say that it is foundational to literature in the same way that Leviticus is foundational to Holy Scripture: tediously. ( )

So...this book is one giant joke constructed of smaller jokes and it takes the mick out of nigh on everything; novels, novelists, travel, travel writers, army officers, doctors, clergymen, amours, marriage, you name it, and not least readers.

Considered by some to be the first Modernist novel, appearing nearly two centuries before the term was coined, there's no over-all plot and only a few episodes that could really constitute something approaching a sub-plot, there are blank chapters, a space for one to do a portrait of one of the characters and other visual puns, including one on the structure of the book itself and on and on but the main approach is to digress; the digressions pile one on another so high that we don't get to the titular character's birth until about p250...it all crazy, irreverent, scandalous for the time (especially being written by a member of the clergy) and very, very silly if one just goes along with the mood and drops any expectation of even the normal conventions of the novel of the period, let alone the present day.

But - there had to be one, right? But, after a while the jokes wear thin through repetition, the later stages dragging because of it. Originally released as nine books over a period of years, contemporaries could not have done what we all do now and pick it up as a single volume and try to read it from start to finish in one focused push - and that was to its advantage. Serial publication meant one could not over-dose very easily, which I did despite taking months of not really hurrying. It might be better read as originally published; as nine separate books spread out over a much longer period of time than I took. ( )

Wildly inventive in its time for its completely nontraditional approach, with infinite digressions and absurdities taking the place of most of the biographical story-telling, but a slog to get through 250 years later. The prose is dense, with countless references that require extensive footnoting to make sense of, and the humor is dated. Ironically the very first chapter of volume one is the most memorable, with Sterne wryly telling us of what happened while his father and mother were in the act of conceiving him. The portraits we later get of his opinionated father and his gentle Uncle Toby, who likes talking about siege warfare over anything else, are mildly amusing, as are the bits of high-brow bawdiness sprinkled in. Less interesting is the satire of various theories of the day (now quite obscure), detailed references to the works of John Locke, and the digressions that lasted for tens of pages, where the length I think was supposed to be part of the humor. This is a novel I liked more for what it represents than I liked actually reading, and had to take breaks from. When reading becomes such a chore, it’s telling you something. ( )

A book that has been sitting on my shelf for too long. I started listening to the audio version of it (couldn't get into the paper version).
And that one I also gave up on.
The book seems to go nowhere, the narrative just passes my ears and leaves no trace whatsoever, the narrator doesn't have a nice voice to listen to... I gave it 5+ hours of listening, but enough is enough. I give up!

Trim, Uncle Toby, Tristram, Obadiah, Susannah and the author's father occupy the many pages of this meandering tale. Everything digresses or moves off as the fancy strikes the author, reminding him of something else that should be discussed first. It made me laugh out loud. ( )

It's been called the first post-modernist novel, skipping realism, naturalism, modernism, etc. That is perhaps an exaggeration, but it does seem to be in a class by itself.

I thought Volume VII dragged a bit, taking us out of the Shandy households for an excursion through France. Perhaps the English loved both the critiques of the French and, I'm guessing here, the parody of Continental travelogues of the time.

Overall, it can be a slog and try one's patience, and he seems to rely way too much on references to Burton, Rabelais, Cervantes, and other favorites to convey his opinions. And since I'm not of a mind to investigate the philosophers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries to "get" it, I must withhold any final judgement and just say there was some humor there that kept me going. Being very Church of England, Sterne wasn't afraid to criticize Catholicism, especially its more egregious acts in Spain and Portugal, those fun times for the tormenters employed by the Inquisition. ( )

There's scarcely a page's worth of Tristram's life in this satirical novel outside of a mad dash through France, but perhaps there's some of his opinions. Sterne's joke is that Tristram gets so terribly sidetracked into setting up the background for launching into his autobiography, he never really gets around to it. We are introduced to the circumstances of Tristram's birth - but then there comes an aside while he auctions his biography's dedication, and then come several details about the midwife who served at his birth; then about the parson who paid for her credentials; then the story of the parson's horse ... and already we are getting nowhere fast. Another 500 pages of this lies ahead. It can frustrate or amuse, and may often do both.

There's all kinds of playfulness with exploring the limitations of literature, and in drawing comparisons with the strengths and weaknesses of other forms of art. The novel was a new and exciting form in the 1700s and Sterne was happy to indulge, but at the same time refute any thought that it was an ideal medium for delivering all human experience. When he uses a page and a half to describe someone's stance, it's of no matter except to demonstrate how poorly the written word captures what an actor conveys instantly. Similarly when he hums a tune, it demonstrates failure to convey an emotive melody. In addition, this work is littered with 1770s postmodernism: interrupting the narrative with a page of black ink or marbling, interweaving Latin with English translations and Greek footnotes, tossing symbols onto the page to illustrate a point, skipping a chapter or leaving one blank, etc. It's easy to find modern authors who 'push the envelope' (e.g. Lemony Snicket, Mark Danielewski etc.) but this work reveals they only follow Sterne's lead from centuries earlier.

Sterne gets shovelled in alongside Fielding and Richardson as representing the state of literature in his period, but his format links more directly to the satirical works of Swift (especially seen in "A Tale of a Tub"). In that light there's many good bits: the cursing of Obadiah, Slawkenbergius' tale, the adventure of the chestnut, and nearly anything that prompts Uncle Toby to start whistling, to highlight a few. Doctor Slop might be my favourite character for dryly recognizing the nuttiness of the conversation, where even the digressions have their digressions. I anticipated I would find this "novel" either fun or frustrating. I've landed on the fun side but I could have done without Part Seven, and the last two parts contain signs of Sterne's diminishing health. This is a classic I'm glad to have read on paper. The Penguin edition's comprehensive endnotes were helpful, and otherwise I would have missed some of the gags. ( )

The prose is rather challenging (and borderline tedious) at times, but that's justr what you have to deal with to enjoy what is surely the finest collection of 18th-century dick jokes. ( )

The prose is rather challenging (and borderline tedious) at times, but that's justr what you have to deal with to enjoy what is surely the finest collection of 18th-century dick jokes. ( )

A mesmerising read. I started reading this extraordinary shaggy dog story in August 1980. A friend warned me that nobody could get to the end of it unless laid up with a broken leg. I ground to a halt, and it was not until June 2018 that I resumed reading and reached the end. No broken bones, just lazing under an umbrella on a quiet Greek beach. ( )